Abstract: Bedford Brown was a state legislator and United States senator from Caswell County, N.C. The collection includes scattered papers of the family of Bedford Brown and of his son, Livingston Brown, whose wife was a daughter of John Bullock Clark (1802-1885), United States and Confederate congressman of Fayette, Mo. Papers include Brown and Clark family letters, beginning in 1836; political correspondence of Bedford Brown only in 1860, and of Livingston Brown, 1866-1876; and Caswell County deeds and miscellaneous papers.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 3 contains a 12 May 1860 letter from an enslaved man in Arkansas (name unknown) to his Uncle Ned on another plantation. There is also a bill of sale dated 31 August 1863 for an enslaved woman named Lucy.

Abstract: Letters to his family from Garver, a federal soldier with the 9th Iowa Regiment in Missouri and Arkansas, 1861-1862, as a patient in Lawson Hospital, St. Louis, Mo., 1863, and in Alabama, 1864-1865. The letters concern camp life, troop movements, battles, Garver’s health, and other matters.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Some letters discuss African Americans Garver encountered. A letter from 28 April 1862 discusses coming upon a meeting group of African Americans. Another letter from 28 August 1862 discusses the skills and skin complexion of an African American female cook.

Abstract: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, organized at Poinsett County, Ark., in 1934, was especially active in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. The Union spread into the southeastern states and to California, affiliating off and on

with larger national labor federations, and maintaining headquarters at Memphis, Tenn., or, from 1948 to 1960, at Washington, D.C. It has become successively the National Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union. Correspondence files of H. L. Mitchell and others at union headquarters at Memphis, Tenn., Washington, D.C., and in Louisiana; executive committee minutes, legal papers, surveys, annual reports, special reports, membership records, applications for local charters, financial records, and contracts; data on conventions, strikes, litigation, and legislation; histories and articles; clippings; relevant mimeographed and printed matter; and miscellaneous forms, lists, and routine local organization papers. The papers concern union organizing, financing, relationships with various federal agencies, strikes, legal defense, and other activities, mainly among cotton field workers in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas, sugar cane workers in Louisiana, and migrant laborers in Florida and California, but also among agricultural workers in other states.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Formed to challenge many of the injustices remaining from the old plantation system, the Union papers include thousands of letters from members, including African-American sharecroppers.

Abstract: German-educated physician, medical editor, and Confederate scientist. Scattered papers of Frank Lowber James, including his diary, 1877-1878, discussing social customs, religious beliefs, race relations, economic conditions, prominent citizens, and other matters relating to Osceola, Ark.; details of his medical practice; his interest in Indian archeology; trips to Memphis; and other matters. Also included are letters, 1886 and 1894, describing his life in St. Louis, Mo., and clippings.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: Daniel A. Powell was born on 29 July 1911 in Wilson, N.C. In the 1930s Powell worked as a salesman for the American Circulation Company, the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, and as advertising salesman for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. He was an account executive for the O’Callaghan Advertising Agency in 1939-1940 and served in the United States Army Air Force in World War II. Powell was briefly the Assistant Information Director for the West Tennessee Office of Price Administration in 1945 and in the same year became the Southern Director of the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.When the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, the AFL’s League for Labor Education joined with the CIO’s PAC to cbecome the Committee on Political Education (COPE). Powell then became director of COPE Region 5, roughly the same territory he had covered for PAC. Powell served in that position until his death, 6 Aug Correspondence, subject files, audio tapes and discs, photographs, and other material of Daniel Augustus Powell (1911-1983), labor union official and civic leader of Memphis, Tennessee. The great bulk of these papers relates to the work of the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) for Area 5, which Powell directed from 1955-1983. There is also material on Powell’s work as head of the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) in the southeast from 1945-1955; his membership in the Newspaper Guild; and his activities with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Memphis, the West Tennessee Civil Liberties Union, the Tennessee Council on Human Relations, the United States Civil Rights Commission, and the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence in Series 1 (AFL-CIO PAC/COPE: State Files) contains letters to and from PAC/COPE national officers discussing topics such as responding to issues of race, anti-union activity, and the rise of the radical right.

Series 3 contains Powell’s personal writings. Folder 293 contains materials relating to the Civil Rights Commission of 1966 – 1977.

Folders 297 – 300 contain texts of reports or notes for speeches on such subjects as the attitudes of African Americans in various American cities in 1964, the Memphis garbage strike in 1968, and the rise of the radical right in American politics.

Audiotape T-4364/32 consists of recordings from the 1970 Symposium, “The Emerging South” of the LCQ Lamar Society. Participants include George Esser and Maynard Jackson; topics discussed include “The Black Man in Southern Politics”

Image folder P-4364/26-32 contains an image of a parade in Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

Abstract: Miscellaneous papers relating to United States forces during and immediately after the Civil War, including United States naval orders and correspondence, 1863-1865; muster rolls and pay rolls, 1864; a United States Bureau of Information manuscript, 1863, listing the organization of the Army of Northern Virginia; a narrative report of signal activities at Beaufort, N.C., in connection with seige of Fort Macon, N.C., 1862; a manuscript outline of General George Stoneman’s last cavalry raid, 1865, written in 1867 by a participant; maps of waterways in Vicksburg, Miss., and Savannah, Ga.; an account of the siege of Fort Pulaski, Ga., by a member of the 48th New York Infantry Regiment, which operated siege guns on Jones and Daufuskie Island, S.C.; a Union soldier’s description of treatment in “rebel jails,” 1865; a letter of complaint regarding the federal occupation of the North Carolina Military Institute, 1865; and miscellaneous pictures, biographical sketches, and other papers.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included are muster and pay rolls of the 46th Regiment of the U.S. Infantry, a regiment of black soldiers from Helena, Arkansas from 1863-1864 (See Oversize Paper Folder OP-150/4).

Abstract: The Southeastern Cooperative League, an interracial organization established as the Southeastern Cooperative Education Association in 1940, became a federation of cooperatives in 1941. It worked to promote agricultural, consumer, manufacturing, and housing cooperatives throughout the Southeast from 1940 until its demise in the early 1950s. Correspondence of Southeastern Cooperative League officers Lee M. Brooks, Edward Yeomans, Elizabeth Lynch, Charles MacGill Smith, and Morris Mitchell; organizational records; educational materials; and materials relating to the cooperatives that were members of the Southeastern Cooperative League.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Of particular interest is correspondence of members the African American Executive Committee, as well as the League overall and its members in Series 1. (Of particular note, see folder40 with correspondence of Gillis Cheek from Shaw University about North Carolina Cooperatives).

In Series 4, there are pamphlets and other information related to nine local cooperatives, including African American cooperatives in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Abstract: The William Shanks family and the William A. Moody family were related. Both were chiefly tobacco planters of Granville County, N.C., and Mecklenburg County, Va. The Royster family of Granville County was related to the Shanks and Moody families. Chiefly business papers, with scattered family correspondence and miscellaneous items. Business papers pertain to the administration of estates and to plantation finances, and most involve William Shanks between the 1830s and the 1870s. Earlier financial materials include papers of William Shanks’s father, Robert Shanks, mostly between 1801 and the 1820s, and of Williams Shanks’s brother-in-law, William A. Moody, in the 1830s and 1840s. Later business papers are for William Shanks’s son, Henry T. Shanks. Estate papers appear for Benjamin Moody, Francis Royster, Robert Shanks, Elizabeth Shanks, and others. The financial items consist of bills, receipts, accounts, slave bills of sale, slave lists, deeds, legal agreements, correspondence concerning personal finances and the sale of tobacco, and summonses. Family letters touch on social, religious, plantation, and school life; slavery; politics in Macon County, N.C., Fayette County, Tenn., Drew County, Ark., and several locations in Virginia; and overseers’ duties in Clarke and Hinds counties, Miss. There are a few Civil War letters relating to life in the Confederate army. Also included are poems, a hymn, and a pamphlet.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Business papers relate to the administration of estates and to plantation finances, and correspondence touches on slavery and overseer duties in North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia (See Folder 3). Legal and Financial papers in Series 2 include slave bills of sale and slave lists (1801-1865). Of particular note is an 1837 legal agreement on the division of slaves belonging to the estate of James Royster.

Abstract: Letters to John Mebane Allen of Arkansas from friends and relatives in Alamance County, N.C., and extracts from a journal kept by Allen during his move from North Carolina to Arkansas in 1852, and compiled and indexed by Elizabeth White Furman, ca. 1974. Letters, 1853-1859, from North Carolina discuss personal, local and agricultural news and occasionally comment on politics, the economy, railroad building, operating a tannery, mining, and the hiring and sale of slaves. A version with virtually identical contents was privately published in 1974.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included is a letter to “Aunt Jenny,” a slave owned by Allen, which discusses important events in the lives of related slaves still living in North Carolina (1856). Typed transcript only; location of originals unknown.

Abstract: Rice Carter Ballard (c. 1800-1860) was a slave trader based in Richmond, Va., who worked in partnership with the large slave trading firm of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield in the late 1820s and early 1830s. By the early 1840s, Ballard had settled down as a planter with several plantations in the Mississippi Valley. He married Louise Berthe around 1840 and made his home in Louisville, Ky. Ballard and his wife had three children: Ella (b. 1841), and twins Ann Carter and Charlotte Berthe (b. 1847). Letters, financial and legal materials, volumes, and other material documenting Rice Ballard’s life as a slave trader and planter. Letters include several from Henry Clay about court cases involving the legality of the slave trade and one from Mississippi Governor John Anthony Quitman about payment of a debt. Letters and financial records, 1820s-early 1830s, document day-to-day operations of the interstate slave trade among Ballard in Richmond, Va., John Armfield in Alexandria, Va., and Isaac Franklin in Natchez, Miss., and New Orleans, La. Records, 1840s-1860, document Ballard’s administration, in partnership with Judge Samuel S. Boyd, of a number of cotton plantations in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, especially Karnac, Magnolia, and Outpost. There are many letters from Boyd, from the overseers at the various places, and from Ballard’s cotton commission merchants in New Orleans. Letters discuss the slaves, improvements on the plantations, family life, politics (including especially the Know-Nothing Party), and financial arrangements. Also included are letters to and from Louise Rice about her life in Louisville, Ky. There are also three letters from slaves, 1847, 1853, and 1854, all from women asking Ballard for help with emancipation or with pending sales of themselves or others. Other materials in the collection supplement the letters with details of the slave trade, Ballard’s other financial activities, and plantation life.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection